The Difficulties of Living at the Edge of “Superfast Broadband”

What do you do when a Government’s network availability checker says you can get a fixed “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) service, even though you cannot? Questions like this crop up from time-to-time in our inbox, so we’ve decided to take a look at one example from Scotland in order to highlight the issues it can cause.

Firstly, we should clarify that this article isn’t strictly looking at the common issues related to poor home wiring (i.e. 30Mbps+ may technically be possible but an issue or fault on the line within or outside your home prevents such speeds), or a lack of awareness about alternative networks (i.e. a 30Mbps+ service exists, but you are unaware and may be looking in the wrong places). But both of those can be relevant.

The issue that we’re going to be examining today is more tightly confined to what can happen at the edges of Openreach’s (BT) Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) network, specifically where the coverage of one VDSL2 cabinet ends and another one begins.

In some areas this can result in communities being split by fixed line performance, with those at the end of one cabinet’s FTTC service receiving slow speeds, while those nearer to the other cabinet may see well above 30Mbps+. Such situations are irritating enough, but they’re sometimes made even worse by network coverage checkers that fail to recognise that the issue even exists.

A Case from Scotland

Take the example of Pencaitland (Tranent) in East Lothian (Scotland), which is a rural village with a modest population of around 1,500 that sits about 12 miles South East of Edinburgh. The community is largely served by two FTTC street cabinets, one is positioned inside the village (Cabinet 5) and delivers superfast speeds to a big part of the area, but a few homes are also connected to a more distant cabinet (Cabinet 6) and, for some of them, that has become a problem.

Will Arbuckle, Local Resident, explains:

“I have what I’d call poor internet speed. 10Mbps down, 1Mbps up. It’s not abysmal but it does restrict my work. I’m an animator, who does work for end clients such as the BBC, NHS etc. File sizes can be large.”

Unfortunately for Will, the Scottish Government’s (SG) broadband checker (here) states that a “commercial broadband provider has built a superfast connection at your address,” except this isn’t the experience for his house (as above). But hop a few feet across the road and it instantly becomes a different story, with speeds of 62-40Mbps being fairly common.

Will is connected to Cabinet 6 and is largely surrounded by properties on Cabinet 5, all with better speeds. Meanwhile, BTWholesale estimates that Will’s line should be able to deliver ADSL2+ speeds of up to 15Mbps (from the exchange) and FTTC speeds of between 14-25Mbps (from the cabinet), although he clearly isn’t getting the upper end of that.

Suffice to say that there’s probably a combination of things going on here. On the one hand, Will is unlucky to be near the edge of Cabinet 6’s coverage where speeds are naturally slower. On the other hand, there could be some issues with poor home wiring, ISP congestion and cross-talk interference that may be impacting his line speed. Openreach has investigated his line and found no problems, other than its length (they can miss things).

Openreach told Will:

“[The customer] currently has a fibre broadband service but isn’t getting superfast speeds. This is because the Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) technology that he’s connected to has a limit of up to 1.5km from the fibre cabinet to the premises.

The line from his premises to the fibre cabinet is longer than this. This doesn’t mean our network is sub-standard, inadequate or that there’s a fault with it, it’s just the limitations of the FTTC service. So, this means that whilst Mr Arbuckle is able to get [hybrid] fibre broadband, the speeds aren’t superfast.”

We suspect BTWholesale’s estimated line performance may help to explain why Will’s home is classed as being covered by “superfast broadband,” despite the fact that he’s getting much worse than the estimated performance. The predicted speed of c.14-25Mbps would probably be close enough to be considered as a covered under the original Digital Scotland contract and almost all nearby homes do seem capable of better.

However, none of this helps Will. Like others in his situation, the results from the SG’s broadband checker prevent him from being able to access gigabit broadband vouchers, which might potentially help to fund a solution. Likewise, it also means that his situation may be overlooked by the new R100 programme. The UK Government’s new £5bn Project Gigabit scheme might also help, but it’s too early to know.

Over the years we’ve heard from plenty of people in Will’s position, where issues of cabinet coverage and copper line quality often conspire to result in sub-superfast speeds, even in areas where all of the local premises are officially deemed to be “superfast” capable. None of this is a new problem. We asked the SG for their thoughts last week but received no response.

We think that it would be handy for the SG’s coverage checker, as well as any others used by similar programmes, to include a simplified ability for end-users to dispute claims of “superfast” capability for specific addresses. As it stands there isn’t a clear path for disputing such results, although we understand that the SG do accept queries from people and will make amends or give vouchers where appropriate.

Operators like Openreach do also provide a four monthly update report to programmes like R100, which can help to address incorrect speeds by reflecting the latest industry feedback via website checkers. But the ultimate answer to all this, of course, is to move all off of copper-based lines and on to full fibre, which doesn’t suffer from the same signal degradation problems.

As we’ve said before, this article isn’t a particular criticism against the SG because issues like this will crop up across various different UK local authorities. At the end of the day estimates of copper line performance won’t always be reflective of the real-world experience for some consumers, but they’re one of the few reasonably effective tools that we have for modelling such things.

As for Will, we note that Tranent is listed as a location that is planned to benefit from Openreach’s new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network (here), although it remains unclear whether the local deployment will be extended across his particular village.